Summary of VSMM Board of Directors Meeting 2017 (November 02nd, 2017)
Participants (13):
- Alonzo Addison (VSMM President)
- Gabriele Guidi (VSMM Vice-President, Politecnico di Milano)
- Michele Russo (VSMM Secretary, Roma Sapienza University)
- Lizbeth Goodman (VSMM 2017 Conference Chair, University College Dublin)
- Diana Domingues (University of Brasilia)
- Phil J. Ryan (University College Dublin)
- Zi Siang See (Sunway University)
- Jacquelyn Ford Morie (All These Worlds)
- Stephen Fai (Carleton University)
- Lisa Fischer (Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation)
- Simona Morandi (Sassari University)
- Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem (Nottingham Trent University)
- Halina Gottlieb (Digital Heritage, Sweden)
The meeting started with a positive review by Lon Addison of the VSMM 2017 Conference Organization and results, in relation to the new conference formula of 5 minutes for talk and final panel at the end of the track. In such sense some suggestions for future conference organizations came from Diana Domingues: first, the necessity to create a network between track speakers before the conference, giving the opportunity to share papers and knowing the research contents, to understand better the overlapping field of application and the distinctive elements. In addition, she suggested both to enlarge the field of technology applications, trying also to give the students the opportunity to participate to some talks. Lon Addison remembered to all that this VSMM edition have been planned in a brief time to fill the Digital Heritage 2017 lack, so this significant effort to introduce a new presentation formula has given satisfactory results, having good improving margins for the future. Lizbeth Goodman agreed with all the suggestions, proposing to strengthen for the future the network between research centres to improve knowledge exchange and telepresence communication.
Closing VSMM 2017 edition discussion, Lon Addison started to explain shortly the evolution of Digital Heritage Conferences, describing new scenarios of DH2018 coming in San Francisco, a very important meeting with wider application areas, mostly focused on Digital Heritage issues. Lon Addison observed the importance to preserve VSMM Conference peculiarities respect to DH one in terms of topics, which should be enhanced during the VSMM Conference. In this occasion he drove people to start planning the new 2019 VSMM venue.
About DH 2018, Lon Addison showed a global framework of the conference, introducing a conference formula which foresees a morning keynotes session of 18 minutes for each talk and parallel session of short talks relative to the papers in the afternoon. In addition, panels, workshops, and exhibition stands from important industry partners like Google and others will be planned. This will be a very important new direction for Digital Heritage and VSMM. For this reason, he asked people to engage young followers to help in the conference stuffs, giving also to the presents the opportunity to contribute as well. At the end he spoke about the venue and the accommodation chance. A discussion about conference opportunities has followed with some suggestions. For example, an involvement of SPIE organization besides IEEE has been considered. For the tracks definition, Gabriele Guidi suggested to use a research system based on mental maps to cluster the main and secondary topics.
At the end of the meeting, Lon Addison proposed Lizbeth Goodman as VSMM vice-president to cover Design and Multimedia topics. All agreed with this important suggestion and she gladly accepted the role.
Michele Russo, VSMM Secretary